How Frank McCourt wants to fix TikTok

Next week, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, goes to court as the U.S. government pushes to force the sale or shutdown of the popular app. One potential buyer, Frank McCourt, Executive Chairman of McCourt Global and former LA Dodgers owner, wants a different experience for TikTok’s 170 million users. For McCourt, the surveillance in tech has caused a crisis, and he’s ready to fix it. Here’s how he plans to right the wrongs of the digital age. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Next week, a U.S. appeals court is slated to hear arguments on a law that would ban TikTok here in the U.S. There’s fear that TikTok enables the Chinese government to spread propaganda and essentially spy on U.S. citizens. You’ve stepped up to say you’d buy TikTok, even without the algorithm that’s driven its success. But before we get into that, do you think TikTok in its current form poses a national security risk? Yeah, absolutely. It does. I have the privilege of seeing most of the briefing that was shared with Congress before the legislation was quickly passed. Look, Bob, I’ve been working on this for over 10 years, and I didn’t think I could be more alarmed than I was when I saw that briefing. It’s massive surveillance technology. Our own American platforms are essentially doing the same thing. The difference here, of course, is that this is a Chinese platform controlled by a government that is not pro-democracy. We now know that a vast majority of young people get their news, not just entertainment, from TikTok. This is the greatest piece of propaganda machinery ever built. When you see how sophisticated it is in dialing up things the Chinese government would like young people to believe and dialing down things they don’t want them to believe, it’s quite alarming actually. So there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a national security threat. I think the more core issue, however, is do we really want to live in a world where this awesome internet technology, which can do great things, is designed in such a way that it’s surveilling us, scraping our data? Do we really want to be manipulated by a few companies? I, for one, do not. I think it’s crazy we’ve gotten to this point, but here we are, and it’s beyond time that we address it. The facts, as you describe them, against TikTok make it sound like the legal case is sort of a no-brainer, like it’ll be a slam dunk. How closely are you following this legal case? There is still doubt about it? We’re watching it very closely. The case is about the legislation that was passed, and ByteDance is making a First Amendment argument—an argument around free speech. The legislation was just belt and suspenders. When all our national security agencies come forward with findings that something—in this case, TikTok—is a national security threat, there is an ability to force the company to divest the asset or to shut it down. That’s the case here with TikTok. The legislation is a bit of a sideshow. Nice to have, but not necessary. But nonetheless, we’re watching it closely because I think this is the biggest issue of our age—not just TikTok, but the fact that we’ve now become slaves to this technology rather than being masters of it. As a TikTok user, would I access the internet through whatever you renamed TikTok, and would that protect my identity when I was everywhere else. But TikTok itself wouldn’t perform the same kind of function it does for users now? It would actually be very similar from a user experience perspective. There will be algorithms involved and possibly advertising involved, but all done with transparency, agency, and permission. Value will be shared with the users who are actually creating the data and content. So, the user experience will be very similar. If you acquired TikTok without its algorithm that ByteDance owns, you get access to these millions of users but wouldn’t it be kind of a hollowed-out version of the experience for those users? No, as I said earlier, there will be algorithms, and there will probably be multiple. People will be able to curate how they interact with them. But not the same algorithms that have driven TikTok’s success to this point? Yeah, and we met early on with the top influencers on TikTok and top creators—20 of them who touch over a hundred million of the 170 million people. We had dinner with them in Malibu, California. I was very curious to hear from them about how they were reacting to our bid. It was interesting because they were very excited because they’re frustrated with TikTok. They’re building community, but they don’t know who it is. They h